Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Now is it time to burn the house?”

— Louise Erdrich

202. “It was Sister Hildegarde’s belief that good penmanship was the defining key to success in life.”

— Louise Erdrich

203. “She smelled of Marlboros, Aviance Night Musk, and her first drink of the late afternoon.”

— Louise Erdrich

204. “At any rate those two, one the shadow of a shadow in the hall and the other a shadow also, an imitation of the ruthless man who’d stolen from the world with careless ease, both poised, caught in time.”

— Louise Erdrich

205. “A MAN FINDS happiness so fleetingly, like the petals melting off a prairie rose. Even as you touch that feeling it dries up, leaving only the dust of that emotion, a powder of hope.”

— Louise Erdrich

206. “And here was the thing I didn’t understand then but do now – the loneliness. I was right, in that there was just the three of us. Or the two of us. Nobody else, not Clemence, not even my mother herself, cared as much as we did about my mother. Nobody else thought night and day of her. Nobody else knew what was happening to her. Nobody else was as desperate as the two of us, my father and I, to get our life back. To return to the Before.”

— Louise Erdrich

207. “When a baby falls asleep in your arms you are absolved. The purest creature alive has chosen you. There’s nothing else.”

— Louise Erdrich

208. “I need a word, a sentence. The door is open. Go.”

— Louise Erdrich

209. “Because everything was alive, responsive in its own way, capable of being hurt in its own way, capable of punishment in its own way, Zhaanat’s thinking was built on treating everything around her with great care.”

— Louise Erdrich

210. “They remembered volleyball as a laid back backyard barbecue pastime, or a gym requirement. They had no idea how fierce and cool the sport had become, how girls had taken it over.”

— Louise Erdrich

211. “How close the dead are. One song away from the living.”

— Louise Erdrich

212. “Getting out of bed, out of a chair, changing her position, was like moving furniture.”

— Louise Erdrich

213. “They drew their water from sloughs or tiny springs, lighted their homes with kerosene. Yet here they were, each person, presenting themselves in worn immaculate clothing. As Indians had for generation after generation, they were attempting to understand a white man reading endlessly from a sheaf of papers.”

— Louise Erdrich

214. “Even the most traditional Indians, the ones who’d kept the old ceremonies alive in secret, either had Catholicism beaten into them in boarding school... or they had decided to hedge their bets by adding the saints to their love of the sacred pipe.”

— Louise Erdrich

215. “Our individual consciousnesses were sieves of the divine. We could only know what our minds could encompass safely.”

— Louise Erdrich

216. “There are people who are always, I think, going to remain people of the book, to use another author’s title, but people of the book, who really must be around.”

— Louise Erdrich

217. “Things started going wrong, as far as Zhaanat was concerned, when places everywhere were named for people – political figures, priests, explorers – and not for the real things that happened in these places – the dreaming, the eating, the death, the appearance of animals. This confusion of the chimookomaanag between the timelessness of the earth and the short span here of mortals was typical of their arrogance.”

— Louise Erdrich

218. “It was ancient and had risen from the boiling earth. It had slept, falling dormant in the dust, rising in mist. Tuberculosis had flown in a dizzy rush to unite with warm life. It was in each new world, and every old world. First it loved animals, then it loved people too.”

— Louise Erdrich

219. “Albertine was one of those who took on too much in order to remain perpetually dissatisfied with herself.”

— Louise Erdrich

220. “The stars were impersonal. But they took human shapes and arranged themselves in orders that conveyed directions to the next life. There was no time where he was going. He’d always thought that inconceivable. For years now he’d understood that time was all at once, back and forth, upside down. As animals subject to the laws of earth, we think time is experience. But time is more a substance, like air, only of course not air. It is in fact a holy element.”

— Louise Erdrich

221. “Any judge knows there are many kinds of justice – for instance, ideal justice as opposed to the best-we-can-do justice, which is what we end up with in making so many of our decisions.”

— Louise Erdrich

222. “It was always what my father called the last leg of the journey. But we did not stop this time. We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.”

— Louise Erdrich

223. “My father had bought an ugly new clock, and it was ticking again in the quiet kitchen.”

— Louise Erdrich

224. “On August 1, 1953, the United States Congress announced House Concurrent Resolution 108, a bill to abrogate nation-to-nation treaties, which had been made with American Indian Nations for “as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow.” The announcement called for the eventual termination of all tribes, and the immediate termination of five tribes, including the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.”

— Louise Erdrich

225. “The first snow of the new year lifted my burdensome thoughts. The snow brightened and cleaned and filled the air with oxygen.”

— Louise Erdrich

226. “Thomas Wazhashk: I am not sure what study the information about our advancement, financially speaking, was based on. But I will tell you it was faulty. Most of our people live on dirt floors, no electricity, no plumbing. I haul my own water like most Indians in this room. I consider myself advanced only because I read and write. Should I not be an Indian person because I read and write?”

— Louise Erdrich

227. “The people stared through her as though she were invisible until she thought she was, and walked more easily then, just a cloud reflected in a stream.”

— Louise Erdrich

228. “Our souls are tethered by the love of things that cannot last, Agnes wrote, a note in her pocket. But she had sometimes to think the opposite. Our souls are freed – the only problem was that freedom was an open and a lonely space.”

— Louise Erdrich

229. “But also, he resisted the idea that his endless work, the warmth of his family, and this identity that got him followed in stores and ejected from restaurants and movies, this way he was, for good or bad, was just another thing for a white man to acquire.”

— Louise Erdrich

230. “In the darkness, she wound herself into the blanket still more tightly. She was swaddled, confined, protected from herself – as in a very exclusively privately run mental hospital devoted solely to the care of one person: Nola. She fell asleep bothered only by the nagging thought that she would have to start all over in the morning. Existence whined in her head like a mosquito. Then she swatted it. Rode the tide of her comfort down into the earth.”

— Louise Erdrich

231. “Eddy tells me his book is basically an argument against suicide. Every page contains a reason not to kill yourself.”

— Louise Erdrich

232. “Everything ceased. She listened hard. Nothing, nothing, nothing. But she could feel the calm breathing of the night. She put on her mother’s mitts, took the ax, stepped out the door. Outside, there was resounding silence. The black sky was a poem beyond meaning.”

— Louise Erdrich

233. “Thomas remembered something from his boarding-school days. There, he’d strategized. The only way to fight the righteous was to present an argument that would make giving him what he wanted seem the only righteous thing to do.”

— Louise Erdrich

234. “When he needed to calm his mind, he opened a book. Any book. He had never failed to feel refreshed, even if the book was no good.”

— Louise Erdrich

235. “Any power she owned lay in her feigned indifference.”

— Louise Erdrich

236. “His generation would have to define themselves. Who was an Indian? What? Who, who, who? And how? How should being an Indian relate to this country that had conquered and was trying in every way possible to absorb them?”

— Louise Erdrich

237. “I’ve read that certain memories put down in agitation at a vulnerable age do not extinguish with time, but engrave ever deeper as they return and return.”

— Louise Erdrich

238. “Or maybe there was a god. Mine is the god of isolation, the god of the small voice, the god of the little spirit, of the earthworm and the friendly mouse, the hummingbird, the greenbottle fly and all things iridescent.”

— Louise Erdrich

239. “I was trying to contain a surprise bubble of exultation bobbing in the anger I have always tried to keep bottled up. Fury lived inside me under pressure. Now it all started going off inside my body like popped corks; the rage-champagne and feral glee were foaming out.”

— Louise Erdrich

240. “The gun jammed on the last shot and the baby stood holding the crib rail, eyes wild, bawling.”

— Louise Erdrich

241. “These are the decisions that I and many other tribal judges try to make. Solid decisions with no scattershot opinions attached. Everything we do, no matter how trivial, must be crafted keenly. We are trying to build a solid base here for our sovereignty.”

— Louise Erdrich

242. “Wonder what?” “If one of them will ever say, Gee, those damn Indians might have had an idea or two. Shouldn’t have got rid of them all. Maybe we missed out.” Louis laughed. Thomas laughed. They laughed together at the idea.”

— Louise Erdrich

243. “The beauty of the sensation was so intense that fear dropped away. It felt like a kind of birth. She opened her eyes. Sunlight through a foggy window. A green plant on a shelf. The dim delicious fall air. She was a new baby – skin frail as paper, arms weak as milk, brain forming shapes into thought.”

— Louise Erdrich

244. “Everyone seems to have within themselves a collection of poems.”

— Louise Erdrich

245. “They both started laughing in that desperate high-pitched way people laugh when their hearts are broken.”

— Louise Erdrich

246. “The black sky was a poem beyond meaning.”

— Louise Erdrich

247. “Thomas had tried to educate himself, mainly by reading everything he could find. When he needed to calm his mind, he opened a book. Any book. He had never failed to feel refreshed, even if the book was no good.”

— Louise Erdrich

248. “Patrice had come to think that humans treated the concept of God, or Gizhe Manidoo, or the Holy Ghost, in a childish way. She was pretty sure that the rules and trappings of ritual had nothing to do with God, that they were ways for people to imagine they were doing things right in order to escape from punishment, or harm, like children.”

— Louise Erdrich

249. “The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.”

— Louise Erdrich

250. “In English there was a word for every object. In Ojibwe there was a word for every action. English had more shades of personal emotion, but Ojibwe had more shades of family relationships.”

— Louise Erdrich